The battle's done, and we kind of won, so we sound our victory cheer: where do we go from here?
... a blog by Marc Lynch

February 20, 2006

What can you get for $5 million these days?

So the Bush administration has announced $5 million in support for Syria's opposition forces. What an odd number. Seems to me that while $5 million would go a long way towards fixing the damage to my basement caused by a cracked sewer pipe, it is a miniscule amount to actually have any impact on Syrian politics. (Remember Clinton's $97 million for the Iraqi opposition, widely ridiculed as evidence of his fecklessness and lack of seriousness? And that was in 1998 dollars!) Wouldn't the main effect of publicly announcing aid of such a small amount be to publicly stigmatize the Syrian opposition and help Bashar al-Asad tar them as American agents, without giving them any concrete material benefit?

Josh Landis is in favor of the program, but I'm skeptical. Sounds to me like a policy designed for Washington consumption without given much thought to how it would actually play in the region. Wasn't that the sort of thing that Karen Hughes was supposed to weigh in on?

Well, Landis admits the difficulty of Syrian opposition figures taking the money without being attacked by the government. I don't know what the Syrian situation is, but I would think also that taking American money would marginalize activists vis-a-vis their fellow citizens.

In Egypt, for example, US support for Saad ad-Din Ibrahim did nothing to improve his reputation or make liberalism more attractive to Egyptians.

Sorry if that was too general a question, aardvark. I should have simply stated my opinion.

IMO, all other factors aside, Arabs are likely react badly to American attempts to influence who will lead them. Particularly since we have such a long record of doing just that via coups and invasions.

I also wonder what Americans would think if Saudis, for example, tried to promote particular American candidates. (Which in any case is illegal here).

NP - sorry, lost track of that question. I guess I would basically agree that overt intervention - particularly on behalf of specific political figures - will almost always backfire. But more general reform promotion strikes me as legitimate - especially in countries already receiving large amounts of American economic, military, and political assistance. Since just doing nothing means tacitly endorsing the status quo (and underwriting it), I don't see why the US can't attach strings to its support: we expect a free press, with no journalists ending up dead in a ditch because they exposed government corruption... that sort of thing.